1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to flexible containers formed of a flexible tube-shaped sleeve and a dispensing head secured thereto. More particularly, the present invention is directed to such a flexible container in which the dispensing head is secured to the sleeve such that the shoulder of the dispensing head remains uncovered by the sleeve.
2. Description of the Related Art
Flexible dispensing containers are well known in which a tube containing a product, which may be a liquid, viscous liquid or flowable particulate solid, may be squeezed to dispense the product from a dispensing head of the tube. It has been known to form the container from a blow molded plastic. However, this has the drawback that since the dispensing head and the sleeve are formed simultaneously, they are restricted to having the same color, texture, and so on. This limits the aesthetic variety available for the containers.
An example of another conventional container is shown in FIGS. 1 and 2. This conventional container has two major components, a flexible tube-like sleeve 10 and a dispensing head 20. The flexible sleeve and the dispensing head are secured together to form a unitary container. The flexible sleeve 10 may be formed of an extruded plastic such as low density polyethylene, high density polyethylene, linear low density polyethylene, polypropylene, and blends thereof. Sections of the extruded sleeve are cut to length and placed in a compression or injection mold in which the unitary dispensing head 20 is to be formed. The dispensing head 20 is formed of a moldable plastic which may be the same as that of the sleeve, and is molded i.e., non-removably secured, to the sleeve 10 by virtue of the molding operation.
The dispensing head typically has a substantially cylindrical tip portion 30 and a substantially truncated conical base portion 40. The tip portion may have an aperture 32 through which product such as a fluid may be dispensed, and screw threads 34 for attachment of a cap.
The radially outer perimeter of the base portion 40 merges with the head end of the sleeve to form a smoothly rounded shoulder 44 at the joint 50 between the dispensing head and the sleeve. Typically, the sleeve extends over the perimeter of the dispensing head so as to define the majority of the arcuate extent of the shoulder, except for about the 30.degree. of arc of the shoulder closest to the truncated cone surface 42. This has been found to be an adequate overlap of the sleeve and dispensing head to provide a good seal between the two.
Such a two piece container has advantages over a one piece blow molded container since the dispensing head may have a different color, texture, etc. than the sleeve. However, it has the following drawback:
It is normally necessary or desirable to provide art work, a logo, text or descriptive indicia (any of these hereinafter simply referred to as indicia) on the container for aesthetic, advertising or informational purposes. However, due to the extruded nature of the sleeve 10, such indicia are typically printed on the sleeve. It is not possible to inexpensively provide such indicia on the sleeve using embossed or recessed characters on the extruded tube.
Forming embossed or recessed indicia on the dispensing head is still easily done since it is a molded product. However, such indicia are restricted to the truncated conical surface 42 since the shoulder 44 is covered by the sleeve. This, in turn limits the cap size such that the truncated conical surface 42 is left exposed, and so wide caps cannot be used.
It has become necessary, in recent years, to provide containers for products intended for human consumption or personal use with safety seals to assure that the product has not been tampered with prior to use. In the case of such flexible containers it is common to apply a shrink wrap onto the capped container, so that a consumer will known that the cap has not been removed so long as the shrink wrap is intact. For both environmental and cost reasons, however, it would be desirable to reduce the amount of shrink wrap which must be used for each container.